Evil Coca-Cola and the Absurdity of the Age of Excess

Post navigation

In Barton Elmore’s fun, decent dissertation on the history of the awfulness of the Coca-Cola Company, Citizen Coke, the statistics flow by like a sea of crud- Coca-Cola uses at least a trillion gallons of water a year in to make and deliver its sugar-caffeine swill. In a throwaway line, Elmore references the age during which Coke rose as the “Age of Excess,” but this is patently true.

All of us alive are living during this age of Excess, and the success of Coke is one of the great exemplars of this absurd epoch. Coca-Cola is a horrible product, with absolutely no nutritional benefit, a toxic concoction like all sugar-caffeine swills. There is nor reason for humanity to have allowed its promulgation, and it should be canceled forthwith, like all of its lesser competitors, the disgusting, pathetic line-up of planet-destroying beverages: Mountain Dew, Diet Mountain Dew, Pepsi, Red Bull too, Dr. Pepper, Diet Fucking Coke, Diet Pepsi, even seltzer water, but especially the “sodas,”across the world. Sugar caffeine swill is complete waste of enormous resources, in its manufacture, in its delivery, in its contribution to obesity, in its corrupt hold over the easily-manipulated consumers and the legal criminals who staff the corporate -political allied bureaucracies.

The soda truth is not that difficult to ascertain, yet it is resisted by the billions of fix-needing hormigas who will purchase on one of these cheap concoctions today, adding to the stuffed corporate coffers of these wholly unneeded and deleterious mafia. Yes, cigarettes cause outright death, and have been made the subject of a public political campaign, but what stops the same censure and prosecution of the Coke and Pepsi merchants of disease?

In the way is our supersystem, a laughably incompetent, stupidity-laced interlocking protection racket for all manner of capitalist morons. Coca Cola was promoted by lying poltroons as “healthful,” as some kind of “refreshing” tonic for break-needing nobodies, but it was created by sinister legal and political forces who chased huge profits at the expense of the idiotic people who bought the nonsense.

Yet Coke is but one example of the venal, environment and public-health killing “successes” of our modern Age of Excess. The only public figures to take on this cabal have been universally derided, such as billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. There has been a gradual revulsion against sugar-caffeine pushing upon defenseless youngsters in the upper income parenting levels, but just as with cigarettes, the adults of this world are thought to be above any form of responsible direction. And these are not innocent “treats” for stressed-out workers and non-workers of the New Gilded Age – the manufacture and production and advertisement of all these consumers horrors causes direct effects of death and habitat destruction upon the poor people located along the important supply and distribution chains.

How could anybody take this Age of Excess seriously? There is not the slightest chance to get humanity to regulate its vices, especially ones inherited from the revolting American halcyon days of completely unregulated racism and eugenics and “free market” worship. As David McRaney breezily explains in his way-too optimistically entitled You are Now Less dumb: How to Buy Happiness, and all the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself, humans are served poorly by the cognitive structure of their brains. Whatever comes to the fore as dominant social reality gets accorded far too much honor and devotion for simply being in place, as can be witnessed with just about every working piece of social reality now: Das Racist-in-Chief, his coterie of Christian capitalist vermin, the mobbed-up neoliberal Democratic non-opposition, the Five-Hour Energy vials littering America’s worksite parking lots, your Coke, your Pepsi, the GNCs, the local convenience stores peddling chemicalized killers, every last polluted, unregulated, suppurating corner of this inglorious Age of Excess.

And, yes, as McRaney can explain, we all have our intakes of some of this crap, even if FSN can claim magnificent existential purity for not buying a soda, a lottery ticket, a Five Hour Energy crack vial, or a Dunkin Donut today. What it did buy, on the way to work in the cold dark morning, and also after service to a stupid, preposterous bureaucracy, only McRaney could explain well – living in the Age of Excess demands quick hits of compensatory sugar. Yes, guilty as charged.